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Mission Impossible: Sound Radix and their assault on convention

17 Oct 2016

It’s easy to get stuck in your ways, whether using the same synth patches and plugin presets on your tracks, or sticking to the arbitrary recording conventions of yore. Now, there’s nothing wrong with old stuff, and some of those recording conventions — no matter how arbitrary — have withstood the test of time (and countless hit records), so we’re not knocking any of that. It’s just that, with experimentation and out-of-the-box thinking comes innovation. And we like new things, right?

That ‘blue sky’ way of thinking is basically how Sound Radix came about, according to co-founder Nir Averbuch. “Sound Radix was founded in 2010, at a time when I felt that the majority of plug-in developers were focusing on vintage and analog gear emulation. I love vintage gear, and I use the emulations daily, but I also thought that we all have these powerful computers that can be harnessed to perform some magic that analog gear cannot. So why not make some cutting-edge tools that would be impossible to build using analog electronics?” After an introduction to Yair Chuchem, who Nir describes as “an algorithm artist and a true radical”, and “yet another genius” Dan Raviv, Sound Radix, Ltd. was born.

The company’s current team is comprised of free-spirited math geniuses, coding artists, musicians, producers, and a graphic designer who apparently also makes chill-out remixes in his free time. They have a fairly simple goal: to develop innovative and creative software tools to help their users achieve great sounds. But executing this is by no means easy. The team develop very smart algorithms and couple them with easy-to-use, intuitive and immediate interfaces, to give the user an immense amount of power with minimum complexity.

As part of the October 2016 Focusrite Plugin Collective, we’re teaming up with Sound Radix to offer a special Focusrite edition of their groundbreaking pitch-tracking equalizer, SurferEQ 2.

SurferEQ 2 is a high-quality equalizer that can handle conventional EQ duties with ease. However, it's the unique pitch-tracking capabilities that give it its name, and which allow you to fundamentally reshape melodic parts or basslines in ways no ordinary EQ can manage. Traditional sound equalizers are static, and while being effective for broad tone-shaping and room resonance correction, they do a poor job at maintaining the vocal or instrument's timbre as the music changes. Enter SurferEQ 2, which tracks the pitch of a monophonic instrument or a vocal source and can adapt its bands' frequencies relative to the music in real-time, maintaining the natural harmonic balance of the sound source and making it possible to shape the source's timbre relative to the notes being played. Clever, eh?